What can 65 years of hit songs tell us about America?
We analyzed 6,500 Billboard Hot 100 songs from 1959 to 2023 to uncover how music reflects our culture, emotions, and evolving language.
What We Measured
Sentiment Analysis — Is the song positive, negative, or neutral? We use VADER AI to score the emotional tone of each song's lyrics.
Lexical Diversity — How varied is the vocabulary? Higher TTR scores mean more unique words; lower scores mean more repetition.
TF-IDF Keywords — Which words are most distinctive to each genre? TF-IDF finds words that are common within a genre but rare elsewhere.
Word Frequency — What words appear most often? See which terms define each genre and decade (stopwords removed).
Why It Matters
Music is a mirror. When times are tough, do lyrics get darker? When vocabulary shrinks, does it signal cultural shifts?
From the protest songs of the 60s to the hip-hop revolution of the 90s to today's streaming hits—every era tells a story through its songs.
How to Explore
Explore — Dive into genres and decades. See the most common words in Rock vs. Hip-Hop, discover which words are distinctive to each genre via TF-IDF.
Trends — Watch sentiment and vocabulary change over time, with major historical events marked as hoverable dots on the timeline.
Explore by Genre
Discover what words define each genre and how they've changed over time
Top Words in All Songs
Most frequently used words (excluding stopwords)
Distinctive Keywords by Genre
Words that define each genre (TF-IDF: common within, rare elsewhere)
Sentiment by Genre
Average emotional tone (-1 negative to +1 positive)
Vocabulary Richness by Genre
Lexical diversity (higher = more varied vocabulary)
Trends Over Time
Watch how music evolved alongside American history
Sentiment Over Time
How the emotional tone of hit songs has changed
Historical Events
Click events to toggle them on the chart
Genre Summary
What makes each genre unique based on lyrical analysis